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How to Create an Awesome Recruitment Brand Video on a Budget

It’s no secret that video is the go-to medium these days if you want to get more engagement with your recruitment marketing. But you can’t just share out any old video content and expect to sit back and wait for the great results to flood in – you need to create something that actually works for your brand.

Whilst the stats show the potential is there to ramp up your reach and engagement by using video in your recruitment marketing, doing video just for the sake of doing video won’t get you anywhere, and it’s a trap that many businesses fall into.

But how do you know what sort of video works for your recruitment brand and what doesn’t? And how do you go about creating a video that’s engaging and on-brand when you’ve got minimum time to spare and practically no budget?

For this blog, we’re going to take a look at how to plan, create, edit, host and share a top-quality video to promote your recruitment brand. And to keep things extra interesting, we’ll assume you have little-to-no budget so will be shooting everything on a smartphone. Let’s see how it’s done!

Part 1: Planning your video

The initial planning stage is absolutely crucial when creating a branding video, but unfortunately this is the part that many businesses get wrong! If you don’t put enough time into asking the right questions at the very start, your video won’t bring in the results you want and you’ll be left wondering what all the video hype is about.

So first stop, someone should take the lead to keep everything focussed and moving forward. Creating a video brief is the perfect way to focus your ideas – get everything on paper so you can then continuously refer back to stay on track and remind yourself of your end goal.

Use the brief as a way to start asking some important questions about the video and what you want to get out of it to get the ball rolling. It’s a good idea to always think about what you want the return to be on your video first, then work your way backwards.

Here’s an example of the kind of questions you’d want to include in your brief (and the order you’ll want to ask them in):

Who is your audience and how will they see your video? Is it candidates or clients, or maybe other recruiters? Will your video be shared on social, or embedded in email?

Think about your company story: What problem does the team strive to solve? What makes you stand out from the crowd?

Think about the company’s values and culture: What’s the most attractive thing about working there?

What sort of video would suit your business best? A video like our ApprentFish recruitment video (see below) wouldn’t be right for an agency that recruits into the legal sector, for example. Think carefully about your company story and values and make sure your video reflects this.

How should your video be narrated? Do you want voice over, talking heads, or maybe no narration and just some background music instead?

What’s your budget (if you have one)

What’s your deadline?

Having a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your video before you get started will make your life a whole lot easier, and give you a much better return on your efforts.

Note: If at this stage you decide your idea is a bit more ambitious than your skills can support, you could always take your brief and present it to an external freelancer or video production agency. If you go down this route, it’s worth knowing that the more input you have during the planning stages with regards to what you want (in other words, the more detailed your brief is!), the less cash you’ll have to pay them, as they’ll have to put in less work on their side.

Part 2: Tips for creating your video

So, once you’ve got your idea together and your video brief in place, it’s time to start shooting! Here are some production tips to get you started in making a top-class professional-looking recruitment brand video on little-to-no budget:

Lighting

Make sure you don’t stand with your back to bright light. Let light shine on you rather than from behind you (so face windows rather than standing in front of them). Plain backdrops are best to go with wherever possible. For more in-depth details on lighting read this guide.

Sound

Choose a quiet space where possible and always do a few test runs first to check the audio sounds OK. You should always strive to make your audio top class, otherwise it will look like you don’t know what you’re doing and people will lose interest instantly. Luckily, the iPhone microphone is really high quality – there are lots of great sound-recording tips for iPhone in this guide.

It can be a good idea to record the sound separately (so with one iPhone up close to whoever is speaking so it picks up the dialogue) then you can combine using basic editing software like the ones mentioned in the next section.

You can also pick up lapel mics (known as lavalier mics) for around £30, and these can be a good investment if you’re filming outdoors or in a busy office space as they cut out background noise and focus on dialogue.

Shooting

Always shoot landscape and never use the iPhone zoom to zoom in. Move forward with the camera instead. Zooming in on iPhone means you automatically lose quality. If you have a small budget to spare, investing in an iPhone tripod will only set you back around £10.

Failing that, you can always rest the camera on a flat surface and slide it around so it moves smoothly, or even blue-tac it to the wall (above head height to avoid any double chins!). This might sound ridiculous but it works!

Keep it short

Don’t try to do too much with your video. 60-90 seconds is the optimum length to keep viewers engaged – and make sure the first few seconds are top class to hook them in.

Include your company logo!

At least during intro and outro, logos are really important to include and if you’re able to get branding in the background of your video, all the better. Even if your video isn’t specifically for brand exposure, use the opportunity!

Part 3: Editing, hosting and sharing your video

Editing

When it comes to editing your video so it’s tip-top, that it includes your logo and is around two minutes long, try the following free (or cheap) and easy-to-use editing software:

iMovie (available on any Mac) you can also use the iMovie app on your phone or tablet if needs be, but the functions are quite limited.

Animoto - square screen is now available on this app which is great for Instagram and other social channels, but it’s not as good for dialogue.

When choosing your background music, you can download free music directly from Wistia, iMovie or Animoto if you’re using these for editing. Failing that, try hitting up Google with a search for websites that have royalty-free music for sharing.

Hosting

Once your video is looking exactly as you want it, have a look into these free (or cheap) sites on which to host your video:

Wistia - Free for the first 3 videos. If you upgrade to pro, it’ll cost £70/month.

Sharing

Uploading your video straight to Facebook and other social media channels will be the main option for sharing your videos, and this is the option that will get you the most views and engagement.

However, there are other sharing options you can be doing in addition to this. For example, you could lift the embed code for your video from the hosting site you’ve used and paste this into the backend of your own website (on your careers page, for example, or even your website homepage).

Sharing the page link instead of embedding the video will bring more direct traffic to your website, but it is worth noting that you’re likely to get less views if you share this way on social as the they won’t automatically start playing, as videos do that are directly embedded into newsfeeds. You can see how many views you get from videos watched through an embedded link by checking the ‘insights’ page of the hosting site you use, as the social channel insights won’t be accurate in this case.

You could also use the video to supplement a job ad (if applicable) or embed it directly into emails you’re sending to win prospects over, remind clients how great you are, or even reengage candidates on your database.

The potential is there to get great results from your recruitment branding videos, provided you think carefully about the ‘why’ just as much as the ‘how’ when taking those crucial initial steps. Just be sure to learn from each video you make – use the insights tools on social media platforms and your hosting sites to establish what works and what doesn’t.

One of the best things about branding videos is that they can remain current for a long time, so for the relatively small amount of time (and money) you spend making them, if they fit your brand well they’ll be a gift that keeps on giving!

So give it a bash, have some fun with it and follow these simple guidelines to make an impact.

Branding aside, to find out how you can be using video to recruit more candidates, download the eBook below!

About the Author: Nick is Firefish Software's resident video and digital dude. For the last 12 years, Nick has been working as a freelance professional photographer, and was a professional yachtsman in a previous life. When he's not behind the camera, you can normally find him on a long-distance cycle or on the golf course.

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